Archive for the 'Links' Category

Multi-Cloud Is a Trap – Brave New GeekIt comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap.

The Private Cloud Has Failed Us – Chuck’s BlogPerhaps there is no deeper disappointment in life than when a cherished concept fails to produce the desired results. Such is the case with the industry’s notion of private clouds. I’m throwing in the towel, walking away – and cursing under my breath. It’s a failed concept.

What is Code?Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations.

Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983In 1983, though, home computers were unsophisticated enough that a diligent person could learn how a particular computer worked through and through. That person is today probably less mystified than I am by all the abstractions that modern operating systems pile on top of the hardware.

How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming LanguageLisp transcends the utilitarian criteria used to judge other languages, because the median programmer has never used Lisp to build anything practical and probably never will, yet the reverence for Lisp runs so deep that Lisp is often ascribed mystical properties.

C Portability Lessons from Weird MachinesIn this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth.

Your app is an onion: Why software projects spiral out of controlYou start with the best of intentions. You hire a developer to build out your startup idea. But almost every week, it feels like the project needs tweaking. Features start creeping in, and the scope slowly expands. It’s as if the project has a life of its own, and is trying to destroy your life.

Why Are Enterprises So Slow? – zwischenzugsIn this article I want to explain a few things about enterprises and their software, based on my experiences, and also describe what things need to be in place to make change come about.

lenazun/working-remotelyWorking remotely sounds great. We think we’ll save ourselves the commute and we’ll be able to flexibly weave in and out of work and home life. In reality, work takes a different shape when there is no office, and we’re all in different environments trying to connect to other humans. […] These are some of the things we’ve learned while working remotely

Revisiting Using Docker, by Gregory SzorcWhen you look at all the options for running containers in 2018, I think it is obvious that Docker – usable though it may be – is not ideal for a significant number of container use cases.

Where Vim Came FromAnd yet Vim is also a mystery. […] Despite its ubiquity and importance, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of committee or organization that makes decisions about Vim.

Linux Load Averages: Solving the MysteryLoad averages are an industry-critical metric – my company spends millions auto-scaling cloud instances based on them and other metrics – but on Linux there’s some mystery around them.

Living on the PlateauMost of us work in an environment of virtual infinities. There may be some contraints out there somewhere, but most of us know we will never bump into them. That’s what happens when you ride Moore’s trains through twenty-eight doublings.

The Categorical Im-PratchettiveAfter all, it takes as axiomatic that nobody is outside the moral world […]. Kant isn’t having that, and neither is Pratchett. This manifests, for Pratchett, in a refusal to take the dramatically easy way of demonising one or other outgroup.